Citizen Palin Terminates Death Panels

Euthanasia is a fundamental component of socialized medicine

The US Senate finally got it’s mind right. The Senate Finance Committee announced it will drop section 1233, the Death Panel provision, from the senate’s version of “healthcare reform”. The announcement came after indignant denials from the distant left that any such provision existed anywhere in the various versions of “Obamacare” under consideration.

While section 1233 was euphemistically titled “end of life counseling”, anyone familiar with any of the government controlled healthcare programs in existence understands the concept for what it truly is. Guidelines for the rationing of medical care to the elderly, and eventually, the chronically ill and the handicapped. Death Panels.

This victory for life can primarily be attributed to the undaunted courage to speak out of one private citizen. Sarah Palin.

Having optimistically written off Palin as a future force to contend with, after her resignation as governor of Alaska, the distant left was blindsided by the virtually overnight success of Palin’s lightening strike, launched out of her new Facebook page. Severe cases of Palin Envy have reemerged in the bewildered, enraged leftist media.

Maureen Dowd penned out another of her vitriolic Sarah, Sarah, Two By Four columns, likely muttering to herself as she chugged cosmopolitan cocktails in a lower eastside dive. Keith Olbermann, blood pressure slowly stabilized, managed to chip out a patriotic opinion piece for OMSNBC’s website in which he termed Sarah Palin a servant of evil and “a clear and present danger to the safety and security of this nation”. (Wonderful originality. You go dude)

Labeling evil for what it is
On August 7, citizen Sarah posted an entry in her Facebook page criticizing President Obama’s plans to initiate government controlled healthcare in America. “The America I know and love, is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

This simple, unequivocal statement struck at the heart of the most intrinsic evil of socialized medicine. Rationing. And despite all of the diatribes to the contrary, no government controlled healthcare program can function without rationing of treatment in order to control costs. “Controlling costs” is indeed one of the snake oils being promoted to run the whole healthcare swindle past the American people. And there is only one way to control healthcare costs in a significant way. Limit the amount of dollars expended on expensive treatment. And who in society typically requires the highest expenditure of healthcare dollars? The elderly, the chronically ill and the handicapped.

Current government controlled healthcare programs do, in fact, allocate treatment based upon a patient’s projected “return on investment” of government healthcare dollars. And not just in Europe or Canada. How about in the “progressive” state of Oregon?

A dose of socialized medicine
As detailed in Mark Levin’s best seller Liberty And Tyranny, “Barbara Wagner was diagnosed with a recurrence of lung cancer. Her doctors recommended a specific drug to help prolong and improve the quality of her life”.”However, Barbara is a resident of Oregon and therefore, part of the state-run Oregon Health Plan. The state refused Barbara Wagner’s request for the drug since it doesn’t cover drugs that are meant to prolong the life of individuals with advanced cancer. After all, when the Oregon Health Plan was established in 1994 it ‘was expressly intended to ration health care’ to save money. But Oregon also has legalized assisted suicide, and in an unsigned letter from the state, Barbara was informed that the health plan would pay to cover the costs of a doctor to help her kill herself, but not give her the drug to prolong her life. ….It seemed she had reached a dead end until a pharmaceutical company that invented the drug learned about her case and stepped in to provide Barbara with the drug free of charge.”

And we can be sure that it was not a board of physicians who established such policies in Oregon. These decisions were made by state bureaucrats. And citizen Sarah labeled them for exactly what they are. Death Panels whose members maintain their positions by subordinating the individual citizen’s right to life to the perceived best interests of the state.

The Christian-Judeo based democracy, upon which our country was founded, values the lives of our most helpless citizens- the elderly, the Barbara Wagners and the Trig Palins -as much as the lives on any other citizen. Though, to our nation’s shame, our unborn citizens are currently denied this consideration.

Socialism dictates acceptance of one’s place as defined by the state. And socialism, especially socialized medicine, views these “least of our brethren” to be unproductive consumers of government’s largesse, best left to a speedy, pain-free demise.

The transparency of defaming of the messenger
Immediately following the Senate Finance Committee’s announcement to drop the death panel provision, numerous democratic “strategists” were pushed onto television talk panels, trying in vain to discredit the messenger while forcing derisive grins through the egg running down their faces.

The lone talking point was that Sarah Palin had helped her grandmother compose a “living will” to provide guidelines to her loved ones in the event she is unable to render medical decisions on her own. This, it was righteously claimed, rendered Palin a hypocrite for speaking out against the death panels provision at the same time, as several democratic empty noggins phrased it, she was “putting grandma down”.

Such a comparison was nothing less than apples to thoroughly rotted oranges. Typical of the elitist left’s condescending view that the average American does not understand the difference between someone drawing up a living will and that same person being told by a postal worker type government employee that further cancer treatment just doesn’t make sense financially to Uncle Sam.

The message and the messenger, however, have continued to resonate with the American people to the point that white flags are beginning to pop up on the issue of the “public option”. This is likely not sitting too well in certain quarters, from where Elmer Fudd (or Barney Frank) like cries pierce the night: “Ooo that rrotten Paywlin“.

The struggle to keep our medical treatment out of government’s inefficient, heartless, greedy grasp is far from over. But thanks in large part to the efforts of one proud private citizen, the healthcare debate in America is trending in favor of the sanctity of life.

Citizen Palin 1, Obamacare 0